Culture/Contexture: Explorations in Anthropology and Literary Studies - Softcover

9780520084643: Culture/Contexture: Explorations in Anthropology and Literary Studies

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520084640 ISBN 13: 9780520084643

Publisher: University of California Press, 1996

The rapprochement of anthropology and literary studies, begun nearly fifteen years ago by such pioneering scholars as Clifford Geertz, Edward Said, and James Clifford, has led not only to the creation of the new scholarly domain of cultural studies but to the deepening and widening of both original fields. Literary critics have learned to "anthropologize" their studies—to ask questions about the construction of meanings under historical conditions and reflect on cultural "situatedness." Anthropologists have discovered narratives other than the master narratives of disciplinary social science that need to be drawn on to compose ethnographies.

Culture/Contexture brings together for the first time literature and anthropology scholars to reflect on the antidisciplinary urge that has made the creative borrowing between their two fields both possible and necessary. Critically expanding on such pathbreaking works as James Clifford and George Marcus's Writing Culture and Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer's Anthropology as Cultural Critique, contributors explore the fascination that draws the disciplines together and the fears that keep them apart. Their topics demonstrate the rich intersection of anthropology and literary studies, ranging from reading and race to writing and representation, incest and violence, and travel and time.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

E. Valentine Daniel is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and author of Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way (California, 1984). Jeffrey M. Peck is Associate Professor of Germanics at Georgetown University and author of Hermes Disguised: Literary Hermeneutics and the Interpretation of Literature (1983).

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.